Nashville can't afford the cap hit this year for Nylander. It would be just under 10 mill due to him signing so late.

I heard this argument from McKenzie and it is wrong. Nylander could be paid with max bonus. Either by the team he is traded to or in the case of sending him to a team like Carolina where there is an internal cap leafs could pay the signing bonus then trade him and a team would only financially be in the hook for 650k. I believe if he is signed to a max bonus on a 7m deal his cap hit would be 7.1-7.2.

That wouldn't affect the cap calculations though, it would still use the average cap hit in all calculations regardless of the percentage of signing bonuses. Would it not?

Eitherway doesn't that give TO even more power? Since they have more money than all other teams in question they would be more eager to use that financial might?

Good point

No it would not, it is only affected by salary. So What you would do is the days missed calculation from the charts by cap friendly only using 650k then add the signing bonus 6.35m on top afterwards. Regardless of what Toronto wants to do this season nylander will get a max signing bonus this season. Nylander is going to want the money one way or another and this allows us to pay it out now. Think of it this way. Nylander is set to lose 2.3m dollars this season by dec 1. This is 2.3m that we can pay in bonus and deduct from the remainder of contract. If nylander wants 7x6 we could realistically pay him 6.54m with first year signing bonus of 7m and he would make the exact same amount of money. This works out much better for both the leafs and nylander because his cap hit would be 6x6.54. This works well for both the leafs and nylander, where as the cap friendly chart sign him on December 1st works out to be less beneficial to the leafs and does absolutely nothing for nylander as all money saved in the cap hit nylander would lose in the first season.

Well then from a team perspective, there are 2 options they can give him.

1) A bridge deal where they give him a big bonus to entice him to making the deal. He'd be getting millions for sitting out the first quarter of the season.

2) Sign long term and get a higher salary that he would have gotten had he signed earlier in the year.

I am happy with either one of those scenarios.

The problem with this deal is there are so many moving pieces. Maybe nylander is worried about being traded and doesn’t want a big signing bonus that will make him attractive to other small market teams. Maybe he is looking at it as over the next 6 years I want X amount of dollars in total regardless of how long I sat out it’s your fault. Maybe he really is turned off by the idea of playing under Babs. One thing I can say for sure is that this is not some sort of staged hold out. There is no way that the leafs can save on cap hit without it coming out of nylanders pocket, even in the scenario I posted above. 7x7 is 49m.... if he sticks to that overall number of 49m being paid to him regardless of games missed it will cost the leafs in cap hit.